Civilization is A Sculpture: The Art of Dustin Yellin
What have I been working on today?” Dustin Yellin considers over a recent phone call… “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”Yellin is speaking from his studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn on a rainy Monday afternoon. He’s been making art. There’s a “really large work” that’s in progress, but he says he can’t talk about it yet.
He’s been thinking a lot too. “Thinking about the history of consciousness and the history of technology and the history of history and the rain,” he says. “Thinking about the rain because it’s pouring. Thinking about the winter. Thinking about the meaning of time.” All of those thoughts may become part of the art too. That seems to happen a lot for Yellin.
Yellin is a painter, a sculptor and a collage artist whose skills quite often come together in large, hyper-detailed scenes encapsulated in glass. He’s also a thinker and that’s as important as his skills as a maker. Yellin’s work often dives into deep issues, like migration and climate change. The history of humanity, the history of Earth—that’s all a part of his work.
“I think that civilization is a sculpture,” says Yellin.
One of Yellin’s best known works is “The Triptych,” a twelve-ton behemoth of a glass sculpture filled with a collage that brings in found objects, including odd and disturbing items like terrorist trading cards, to create a multitude of surreal scenes. “That was really a dream, culminating works that I’ve been doing for a few years into one large work and also being obsessed with Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ and wanting to make one large epic where I was knitting together ideas that I was playing with and lots of smaller works,” he says. “For me, it was a way to try and take everything that was going on and simultaneously knit it into a narrative work.”
And, like a lot of Yellin’s work, it’s about the details as much as it about the whole scene. “I think you can keep coming back and finding things,” he says. “It becomes not about what you’re seeing, but how you’re seeing it. And you can, instead of look at it, read it.”
There’s an intersection of fantasy and reality—”I think that they can often be one in the same,” he says—that often permeates Yellin’s work. The imagery is imaginative, but the subject matter is rooted in history and contemporary issues.
After “The Triptych,” Yellin made “10 Parts,” a multi-paneled sculpture depicting cataclysmic events. In the tenth panel, what appears to be a flood of mythological proportions, comes to its conclusion with a mass of people, animals, and objects tumbling over a waterfall. “It’s a commentary,” says Yellin, “on the whole world melting and the whole world drowning into the ocean, and a reference to when we thought that the world was flat, with the ocean falling off the edge of the world.”
It becomes not about what you’re seeing, but how you’re seeing it. And you can, instead of look at it, read it.”
As a child in the mountains of Colorado, Yellin found art in nature. “I was picking up sticks and rocks and seeing the multitudes of history in the rocks,” he says. “I always thought that a rock was a beautiful sculpture. Timeless.”
He surmises that his road to art-making began “by stacking rocks and sticks, looking at teepees, traveling to distant lands.”
Yellin dropped out of high school and traveled through New Zealand, Australia and Asia. “I watched Woodstock, the documentary, and had my own little private 1960s in my mind,” he says. Later, he studied under “a strange physicist.” He ended up in New York in 1994. The city was different then, but so was he. “I was young and everything was new,” he recalls.
He found a small place in SoHo. (“It was a lot quieter. And a lot cheaper,” he says.) He made collage paintings, which evolved into sculptures. “I was making a lot of collages and I poured resin on them and I saw an optical quality,” he says. “I was making a sort of Agnes Martin grid out of ripped up pages of a dictionary and I started creating these wood boxes, sort of like Joseph Cornell boxes, but putting found objects and layers of resin.”
He continues, “Then I started drawing around the objects, the way you would around a dead body. I realized that you could draw in space. I removed all the objects and created a strange, almost biological looking drawings or dendrites.”
Those grew in size after he moved to Brooklyn in the early 2000s. “The subject matter at the time didn’t change drastically, more the scale and process,” he says. Scaling up took a lot of learning. “In the beginning, I couldn’t even move a large piece,” he says. “We had to have riggers come and teach us how to move something with straps and a forklift or a gantry.”
In his series Psychogeographies, Yellin builds human forms with collage that are housed in glass. Some works from this series have been seen at the Kennedy Center and as part of a show with the New York City Ballet. The end goal, Yellin says, is to make one hundred twenty figures. He estimates the series to be a twelve-year project with about two to three years left until completion. It was inspired, in part, by the Terracotta Army in China. “I think it was an obsession that went off the rails,” he says of his own series.
Between 2016 and 2017, Yellin made “Migration in Four Parts.” Within the collages, viewers will find people of various ages and ethnicities, their images reflecting different eras of history. They come together in a mass exodus, seemingly looking for routes towards shelter, safety, and stability. “I was thinking a lot with that particular work about migration and about humanity moving from one body of land through the sea to another and trying to put different histories inside of it,” he says. “Obviously, probably feeling the news cycles as well.”
I think a lot of the work is about trapping consciousness or trying to make maps of what’s inside the brain, using the media-found images that are stuck in the quotidian rhythms of our everyday views.”
The news of 2016 and 2017 certainly appear to be part of the works. Between stories of war, environmental tumult, plus political and economic struggle, not to mention the ongoing refugee crisis and the xenophobia that has resulted in its wake.
“I think everything drifts in subconsciously,” says Yellin. “I think a lot of the work is about trapping consciousness or trying to make maps of what’s inside the brain, using the media-found images that are stuck in the quotidian rhythms of our everyday views.”
Maybe “Migration in Four Parts” is about the future as well as the present. “I don’t even think we’ve seen anything yet,” he says. “I don’t think we can comprehend the kind of cataclysmic movement of souls that we’ll be seeing in the next fifty years.”
Yellin likens his work to that of a film director. “I have lots of people helping me in my studio,” he says. Then, there is Pioneer Works, the cultural center he founded in Brooklyn. “At Pioneer Works, there are lots and lots of people. I run around like a crazy person making lots and lots and lots of decisions all day long.”
Pioneer Works is separate from Yellin’s art practice—he stresses that in this interview—and it’s a multidisciplinary space that offers programming that ranges from classes to exhibitions and includes residency programs for artists, technologists, and musicians.
“I dropped out of high school, so I always had to find my own communities of people and I always had to learn from people that were around me,” Yellin explains of the concept behind Pioneer Works. “Then I dreamed of a place where you could find the greatest artists, and scientists, and writers… musicians, filmmakers, and thinkers all together in one room, the way you might do when you’re young and in a room with your friends and bring that into a more public place.”
While the space is separate from Yellin’s career as an artist, there is a similarity in that both seem to emanate from this very deep interest in understanding the world around us.
Learning is at the core of Yellin’s work. “That old adage, the more you know, the more you don’t know, keeps getting more and more real as you get older,” says Yellin. “You get older and you read more and you get exposed to more and you watch more movies. Then, all of a sudden, you learn that there’s so much more that you don’t know. It’s quite endless.”*
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